Chapter One

Chapter One

Technology, Technique, and the Body

IN A GARY LARSON cartoon, a number of dogs are tinkering with building hardware at laboratory workbenches. The caption explains that they are striving to improve canine life by mastering the Doorknob Principle. What makes this funny is partly the idea of pooch scientists standing on their hind legs, manipulating screwdrivers and even microscopes. It recalls the long-discarded notion that we humans are the only tool-using animals. It points indirectly to the unique versatility of the human hand, with its range of grips, and the relative specialization of other creatures' paws and claws.

There is something even stranger than Larson's image, though. Other animals have a surprising ability to manipulate human technology. Not all understand what people do with things, but they develop ways to work with human-made objects, and they transmit this knowledge socially. At the dawn of industrialization, the rats of early-nineteenth-century London, with no direct auditory or visual cues, had long known that water flowed through the lead pipes servicing houses. When sufficiently thirsty, they gnawed right through them. Unfortunately, by the 1830s the pipes sometimes contained gas; the holes left by the disappointed rodents added to the risk of explosions. (Rats also loved the wax covering early matches, brought them back to their dens, and ignited the phosphorus with their teeth, causing still more fires.)

Bears in Yosemite National Park have learned to twist open screw-top jars of peanut butter, to break into food lockers with a combination of paw and snout, and to raid Dumpsters through supposedly protective slots. Bears